Discord Consensus

Christine Hermann (Vienna) examines graphic novel adaptations
of the Lion of Flanders (1838), Hendrik Conscience’s romanticisation of
the most famous conflict in Flemish history, the Battle of the Golden
Spurs (1302), which became one of the foundation myths of Flanders.
In her intermedial analysis, she traces the ways in which the narrative
is transformed in various such adaptations from the 1940s to the 1980s
and pays special attention to the representation of conflict in these comics:
aspects of violence, focalisation of the opposing parties, and the
‘modernisation’ of the historic confrontation.
Tanja Collet (Windsor, Ontario) addresses a Low Countries-​related
conflict abroad by investigating language controversies in the Gazette
van Detroit, the Flemish daily (nowadays weekly) newspaper in the
area of the North American Great Lakes. Her analysis of the editorials
of this immigrant broadsheet during the First World War, at a time when
Imperial Germany was attempting to exploit Belgium’s linguistic divide,
demonstrates the conflicts that a distant immigrant community was
exposed to during this time, torn between Flemish (linguistic) nationalism
and outward political pressures.
Reinier Salverda (Leeuwarden/​London) turns his attention to a
more recent conflict, the Battle of Arnhem (1944), one of the decisive battles
in the last stage of the Second World War. Rather than focusing on
the battle itself, which is well known, not the least from cinematic dramatisations
such as Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far (1974), based
on Cornelius Ryan’s eponymous account of Operation Market Gardeb, he
looks at the aftermath of the battle and its impact on civilian life in the
city. Drawing on a range of contemporary eyewitness reports which bring
home the brutal realities of forced evacuation, the subsequent large-​scale
plunder and the destruction of the city between September 1944 and the
liberation in April 1945, he analyses how, over the following twenty-​five
years, Arnhem made a full recovery, rebuilding and reinventing itself
until post-​war reconstruction was declared complete in 1969.
From a postcolonial perspective Stefanie van Gemert (London) investigates
the first and the last novel of the Grande Dame of Dutch East Indies
literature Hella S. Haasse (1918–​2011) and their reception in contemporary
Dutch newspaper reviews. Relating Haasse’s Oeroeg (1948) and Sleuteloog
(2002) to postcolonial theory about colonial ‘belatedness’, she argues that
Haasse’s inside knowledge of colonial society provided her with a critical
postcolonial attitude as early as 1948, whereas contemporary Dutch newspaper
reviewers remain remarkably uncritical of colonial categories.
Jenny Watson (Swansea) investigates Ben Sombogaart’s film Twin
Sisters (2002), an adaptation of Tessa de Loo’s best-​selling 1994 novel
Introduction 3